


The Dimension of Grief (the Art of Letting Go)

by LaceKyoko1138



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, Post-Dark Side Of Dimensions, Temporary Character Death, implied prideshipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23338579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaceKyoko1138/pseuds/LaceKyoko1138
Summary: Yugi and Kaiba deal with Atem's departure in different ways. Yugi learns to move on, that it is okay to let go. Kaiba clings to his feelings and beliefs until the very end.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	The Dimension of Grief (the Art of Letting Go)

**Author's Note:**

> The anniversary of my friend's death is coming up so I've been thinking about him a lot. Naturally I wrote a fic to embody that. For me, The Darkside of Dimensions was about how differently people deal with grief and ironically enough I had watched it shortly after my friend's death, and that theme became abundantly clear. Weird how that works out.
> 
> I couldn't sleep last night so this is mostly a stream of consciousness, which is how I write the majority of my stories. Consistency is not something I partake in frequently.
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys it. Please leave a kudos and comment. I appreciate them.

He accepted it at first. He knew this was something his partner, his other half, was meant for. Atem, never truly of this world, deserved to go back from whence he came. It wouldn’t be fair to keep him tethered to this timeline despite the bonds he made here. Yugi knew that, understood it, but as time went on, he realized that perhaps he understood less than intended.

Atem was gone, and there was nothing Yugi could do to bring him back.

Yugi went back to school like normal. Well, maybe it wasn’t _normal_ , considering all the strange adventures he embarked on. But they weren’t intentional, and if he really was the protagonist, not an NPC he sometimes thought he was, then it was his duty to be the hero, even if Atem did most of the fighting and Yugi took the credit. Atem didn’t mind. He wasn’t supposed to be alive after all.

Of course, that was something Atem wasn’t aware of until he started to become more cognizant of his position. At first he was an angry, confused spirit bent on playing sick games of vengeance against those that wronged him, even if they didn’t wrong him specifically, just the boy whose body he inhabited. But as time went on, and Atem began to surface more and more, he started to find his own identity, even though he wasn’t sure what exactly that entailed. He was definitely someone at some point, but at the time, he just knew that he was somehow Yugi’s other self, as Yugi called him. Atem didn’t know his actual name, sometimes just being referred to as a darker version of Yugi. That somehow perverted Yugi, made him into something the boy truly wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything either could do. They just had to continue to fight for justice in the form of cards.

These were things Yugi came to understand, accept. Atem did find out his true name. He did illuminate the darkness of his amnesia and became his true self. And then, he faced off with Yugi, and Yugi won, because both knew each other so well, but perhaps Atem didn’t know himself as Yugi seemed to, and that is why he lost. It was Yugi’s turn to be the new ‘pharaoh,’ which meant that Atem could finally be at peace. Yugi inherited the legacy, and so Atem left.

This did not change the fact that Yugi missed his other self so much. Perhaps it was incorrect to call Atem as such, but to Yugi, that’s what Atem would always be. It was a fond name, just as Atem called Yugi his partner. They were brothers in arms, kindred spirits, almost twins… Yugi had his friends, but Atem was something more, beyond a friend, but not a lover. A different type of relationship, a different type of bond. It warmed Yugi’s heart, but Atem’s absence left him cold.

Sometimes Yugi would lay in bed at night, alone with his own thoughts. Out of habit he’d talk aloud to a spirit who could no longer listen. Yugi felt embarrassed when he realized he’d have to develop the new, more normal habit of keeping his thoughts in his head. He sometimes wrote in a journal when his thoughts were too much to imprison in his skull. They needed to be released, but they didn’t always need a willing ear. Social media would be a disaster; he did not need people who weren’t aware of the situation to think he lost his mind. Those sites were meant for memes, promoting the gaming shop his grandfather ran, and keeping up with current events. So Yugi did his journalling and went to school and played card games with his friends. Things were as normal as they could get.

But even if one lived their life the way a normal citizen would, to Yugi, this was not normal. There wasn’t another voice in his head to tease him about asking Anzu out. There wasn’t a voice to tell him a good strategy for Duel Monsters. Nothing about this was normal for him, and he knew it wasn’t really normal for his friends. But Jounouchi, Anzu, Honda, and Bakura would never quite understand what Yugi experienced. Well, maybe Bakura, but the white haired boy’s relationship with his other half wasn’t a mutually good experience. Bakura hated the spirit. The spirit ruined aspects of his life and left him with a wicked case of PTSD. Bakura didn’t talk about it, but they all knew that Friday afternoons were reserved for a psychiatrist appointment. Yugi wondered how exactly Bakura would talk about the spirit of the Millennium Ring, but perhaps the doctor just assumed Bakura was fighting some sort of dissociative identity disorder or something like that and did the appropriate therapy. Or, maybe, Bakura spoke of the spirit as an abusive ex, which would...sort of be more believable. Regardless of how Bakura referred to him, they all knew he was trying to get help. Whether it was working, he never said.

Kaiba seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. After the events of Atem’s departure, the CEO of the massive gaming conglomerate was intent on furthering the card game’s potential, going so far as to buy out Industrial Illusion’s IP, and dramatically improving holographic tech. He had dropped out of high school ages ago; after his six month coma, and the attempted rescuing of his brother, his subsequent soul kidnapping, and the resolution of the whole Duelist Kingdom tournament, Kaiba focused on his own projects. School at that point was useless to him.

Yugi and his friends never kept in contact with Kaiba, even after Battle City, only seeing his exploits in advertisements, new, smaller tournaments (which still managed to be spectacles), and sometimes a news story of some fishy stuff happening in the labs. They did not know exactly what he got up to.

How Kaiba dealt with his grief was the complete opposite of Yugi’s, but none of them ever knew that until the events of Kaiba somehow finding the lost Millennium Puzzle and the duel with Deva, that monstrous enemy. Yugi became resigned eventually to let go; he had already went through the normal stages of grief and had finally gotten to the acceptance stage. This was so because Yugi had friends to rely on. He was mentally healthy in that regard. Having a support system of people who also missed the pharaoh did wonders: they could all commiserate and it ultimately helped them move on. But Kaiba, who seemed to have no concept of love and friendship and togetherness, seemed to have permanently been in the denial stage from the get-go. Somehow, even his only kin Mokuba couldn’t get through to him. Mokuba was still young and obviously did not have the capacity to offer actual sustainable support, and the kid took Kaiba’s word as gospel sometimes. He was clever, sharp, creative, but even he couldn’t seem to get through to his brother. When Seto wanted to find a way to bring the pharaoh back, Mokuba supported him. Both brothers were arrogant and intelligent, but one would think at least one of them would have some sort of sense, and maybe it really was Mokuba in the end, but they still set to the task of bringing Atem back with a furious fervor.

And then, when everything seemed to be lost, Atem did manage to find a way to save them all, in classic Atem fashion. Yugi got to see him one more time, no words spoken, because nothing needed to be said. It was rather ironic because even though Yugi had finally accepted Atem’s ‘death,’ and Kaiba did not, Yugi was the one who got to actually see him with his own eyes, and Kaiba didn’t, because he had been trapped in some other plane by Deva during the duel. Granted, it was in a moment of surprising support by Kaiba to defend Yugi that led to Atem’s temporary resurrection, but it may have been a little unfair to the CEO who wanted to see his rival again. Kaiba knew Atem had come back, and was pleased by that; it made Yugi question why Kaiba seemed to be satisfied by that when he had gone to some insane lengths to convince Yugi to duel him, so Yugi could wear the Puzzle again in some vain attempt to bring Atem back. Yugi knew it wasn’t the Puzzle’s power, because Atem was no longer trapped. Kaiba didn’t seem to grasp that at the time. The look of disappointment and utter loss in his eyes told Yugi everything: Seto Kaiba actually had a heart after all, one that wasn’t reserved just for his brother. Yugi may have spied slight tears in his not-friend’s eyes, but Kaiba had fought them off. Yugi smiled about it in retrospect.

Yugi had taken over the shop. Anzu moved to New York as she had dreamed of doing. Jounouchi still dueled. Honda worked in his father’s factory. Bakura...well, he was still enigmatic. Sometimes he travelled, probably to continue his late father’s work. Yugi could never quite pinpoint what exactly Bakura did, but maybe it didn’t matter after all. They still kept in touch, but adult life kept them all busy.

Yugi had finally, officially moved on. None of them knew that Kaiba had not.

Because Atem’s short revival told Kaiba all he needed to know: if he somehow harnessed the power of that cube Deva had, if he could somehow translate that odd magical power to his science and technology, then he could just fling himself into another dimension, the dimension that Atem existed in. Because Kaiba couldn’t accept that his rival had died. That he had been a spirit, dead to the world, all this time. Atem had been _alive_ , even if it was vicariously through Yugi. Atem had existed in the present, which meant that he simply was transported to some other place. It proved the theory that other universes existed, but Kaiba wasn’t about to publish those findings. No one needed to know that other than his brother, and his very confused researchers. They all thought him insane, probably, but their praise of his work, his determination to create holographic technology so realistic that it was as if Atem had really been in those thousands of duels he initiated in his lab just to obtain data, just showed them to be sycophants, as he cruelly called them. They still worked for him all the same; the money was just that good.

Kaiba had managed to jet himself into the dimension Atem was in. Mokuba had taken over the company as the new CEO. The citizens of Domino gossiped about where the elder Kaiba went. Mokuba never openly stated specifics. Something about how Seto was taking a sabbatical, working on other things and that running the company just took too much time for these other projects. People who didn’t know Kaiba personally believed this, or they just didn’t care enough to probe further. But Yugi and his friends knew that the very dramatic and histrionic Seto Kaiba did not just disappear. Something had happened and everyone at Kaiba Corporation zipped their lips. Probably through an NDA. Seto Kaiba liked to brag. He liked to show off. His company was the closest thing to a child he’d probably ever have. He _did not_ just disappear.

They worried he killed himself. Mokuba may have kept appearances during press conferences, but sometimes he’d stop by the game shop to visit Yugi, or he’d talk to Jounouchi briefly during a tournament the company hosted. Both young men saw that the light in Mokuba’s eyes, the spark that made him the nicer brother, had been extinguished. He missed his brother. Seto Kaiba was gone.

Yugi tried to casually bring it up, but Mokuba would detect what Yugi was trying to do and defer the conversation to something else. Jounouchi was blunt and just asked in his rude way. Mokuba would get defensive and reiterate what he told the public. Jounouchi would say “That’s bullshit and you know it,” and usually Mokuba just walked away in a huff. Sometimes he’d sling an insult in true Kaiba style. No matter what, he never revealed the truth.

Because, to Mokuba, no one would believe it. Maybe Yugi and the others would, but how could he say “Sorry guys, my brother dedicated a solid three months on figuring out that cube and mastered it, and then left this world to find his Egyptian boyfriend so he could duel him one last time and he hasn’t come back since” without sounding like an asshole? Without possibly outing his brother? Seto never explicitly said he was gay, and he always referred to his obsession as a pursuit to best the one rival who kept him on his toes. The one he could never beat unless it was some sort of simulation. But no one pursued a rival the way Seto had. There had to be something more. Or at least that’s what Mokuba told himself. His brother had always been a little odd. He liked being on top, being the best, and Atem upended him, so maybe...it really was what he said. Regardless, it wasn’t an excuse to just crash into some sort of afterlife.

Yugi sometimes pondered on Kaiba’s disappearance. Despite what the surly CEO said, Yugi did consider him as some sort of friend. Yugi was fond of him, but only in a way that one would be fond of an eccentric peer. He was amusing, even if he was belligerent. Yugi didn’t like him at first, because of the past transgressions, but Kaiba...was Kaiba. He had his skeletons in the metaphorical closet, so that explained some of his odd behavior. Yugi, ultimately, forgave him. Jounouchi did not, but that was Jounouchi.

Atem’s loss was that of a brother. It couldn’t compare to other losses. Yugi had witnessed it and had known it would happen. But losing Kaiba was very different, because the cause of it was unknown. It was a mystery that he so desperately wanted to solve, but he never would. It was just another tragedy of life.

Yugi did not know, would never know, what happened to Kaiba (unless the man somehow reappeared), but he did know that somehow Kaiba had succumbed to his grief.

Leaving this world due to grief was like transporting to another plane of existence, or perhaps nonexistence. Yugi could never do that to his friends or grandfather. But Kaiba, unafraid, determined and dedicated to his own cause and self, clearly could. The dimension was breached and Kaiba was gone.

The art of letting go was something Yugi had learned and eventually mastered. It was a skill that he knew would be vital to his life. He could be at peace. It was not something that Kaiba comprehended. Kaiba held on to his anger, he held on to his past, despite wanting to shed that burden. He could not let go of the one person who kept his fire burning. And so, with a vengeance, Kaiba clung tightly and doggedly pursued Atem into the afterlife. Atem thought he would find peace in his rightful realm, but Kaiba would always find a way to crash the party.

Like dark and light, they found that they needed each other. There would never be a good-bye again.


End file.
